‘The Crazy Ones’: A Subdued Cap to Robin Williams’s TV Career

The apparent suicide of Robin Williams came three months after the news that his TV comedy “The Crazy Ones” had been cancelled.

The CBS series about an advertising executive working side-by-side with his daughter, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, wasn’t the only new series of last fall driven by veteran starpower — “The Michael J. Fox Show” inspired similarly false hopes of a hit over at NBC. But Williams attacked the job with a signature vigor that even the youngest talent on television would have a hard time matching.

At the 2013 upfront presentations, when networks went through the glitzy ritual of presenting their new shows to advertisers, Williams took the stage in a three-piece suit and with material that flew in the face of the event’s scripted tone. He joked about strippers, compared advertisers to dogs sniffing each others’ hindquarters, and riffed on the 30 years since he’d last been on a TV show — “when upfronts were just a bunch of TV executives and a big mound of blow.”

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.